This time of year is tough for many of us who have survived family abuse. We recently emerged from Mother’s Day’s shadow, and Father’s Day looms. While others celebrate their parents on these holidays, one or both days remind us of everything our relatives didn’t do for us or shouldn’t have done to us.
Mourning the departure of a loved one is about processing loss, but we survivors are mourning something we never had. Neither grief is more profound than the other, but this kind is more challenging in some ways because it’s amorphous and harder to address.
In Jewish tradition, it’s customary to say to a mourner, in reference to their loved one, “May her memory be a blessing.” Survivors of abuse, who mourn the sustaining bonds they didn’t know, have few memories, or none, to bless us. Instead, we carry a nebulous but devastating sense of deprivation.
For many survivors, reinventing the concept of family has been vital to assuaging their grief. After she parted from her abusive parents and siblings, Ellie still craved a sense of connection with other humans that went as deep as DNA. So, she sent a swab of her saliva off to 23andMe, and reports, “I ended up making connections with distant cousins. It helped me to broaden my definition of family. It helped me feel like I can still be a person who connects other people in the family.”
Ellie found an ingenious new twist on the concept of family that’s still based on genetics and still lets her bond with relatives—without having to endure abuse.
Other ways of creating family set genetics aside but tap needs and skills that are just as firmly fixed in us. For thousands of years, monks and nuns in various faiths have formed communities that become de facto families for them, and soldiers have forged bonds with each other that inspire phrases like “band of brothers.” In fact, familial levels of social cohesion abound in our world, from sports teams to college fraternities to office culture to kibbutzim to religious cults.
All of these institutions build on our natural capacity to bond by using experiences, from synchronized movements to shared struggles to mass celebrations to private vocabulary, that deftly weave a tight social fabric from what were once scattered threads.
Society and the people we lived with as kids present as gospel the notion that our family of origin is special, that no other bonds can compare. But that’s not true; in fact, strangers become family all the time, all over the place.
Our culture and our abusers tell us another, more noxious lie: that obligations to our family of origin are an immutable inheritance like the color of our eyes or the shape of our face. Once we’ve set aside that illusion of obligation, we can see family bonds as more like language than genetics.
Just as we’re born with the neural circuitry to acquire language, we arrive with an innate ability to bond. In our earliest days, we learn how to talk — and how to relate — from those around us. But how we talk changes dramatically over time as our brains develop and we make our way into the world. We take on the syntax and slang of our peers; we pick up the jargon of our profession; we stop using terms we heard as kids that hurt other people. And many of us learn new languages altogether when we need or want to do so. All the above phenomena have close analogues in our family life, if we let them. We can abandon ways of relating – and relationships – that don’t serve us well, and we can pick up others that help us thrive.
LGBTQ+ people pioneered the “chosen family” model, a web of people who provide practical and emotional support. Chosen family can include partners or exes, but in most cases, they’re what society at large would classify as “friends.” Some of these groups, like TikTok stars the Old Gays (over 10 million followers), have thrived for five decades or more.
For LGBTQ+ folks of the generation that includes the Old Gays, choosing a family was essential in practical and psychological terms. Rarely could they turn to parents or siblings if they wanted someone to co-sign a lease or talk them through romantic troubles. With few exceptions, their families of origin had already rejected them — or would reject them if their “secret” became known.
Today, the stigma that gay people face has diminished somewhat, so choosing one’s family is less a matter of survival. But it’s still a very popular choice, with benefits for anybody of any orientation.
And it should be the first choice of anyone who has survived abuse. In fact, many survivors have already chosen – or lucked into – relationships that epitomize the family ties we deserved and were denied in our childhoods. Everyone who settles with a partner makes them family, and the fortunate among us find that our partner’s family becomes our own too, welcoming and nurturing us as they do their blood relative.
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Our chosen family also includes anyone who helps us through a breakup, or comes with us to an appointment we’re nervous about, or puts us down as their emergency contact, or cares for us when we’re sick, or keeps a secret for us, or shares a secret with us.
Conider Brandon, whose experiences with a toxic family of origin and a supportive family of choice have taught him that “family is malleable. So many things that I thought were definable and finite, like ‘gay’ or ‘family’ or ‘gender’ or ‘race’ – we made them all up.” In other words, their definitions are arbitrary, and we’ve boiled them all down to false absolutes because those are easier to deal with than the often messy reality.
As Brandon points out, “Family is not going to be the same for any of us in ten years as it is today.” For all of us, family changes all the time, not only as relatives come and go, but as our own needs and awareness shift.
Family should be whatever and whoever we determine it to be. Its only immutable aspect is captured in the question asked and answered by Jack Heifner, who has been part of a chosen family for 60 years: “What do you want from a family?[i] You want someone who lets you be who you are.”
